Crossroads and Structure: A Dreadful Haircut, a Trip to the Mall, and a Life-Changing Decision
How I Wrote a Memoir: Part VII
Write it now. Organize it later.
Whenever anyone asks me, “When did you start writing your book?” I always cite January 2014. But that’s only when I started writing my manuscript in earnest—an essay collection at the time. If the short pieces I wrote for a Gotham Writers Workshop Memoir II class in late 2008 are any indication, I really started writing my book then; I just didn’t realize I was writing a book. Portions of two assignments in particular provided the basis for one of the chapters that would end up in my memoir manuscript—organized differently, written differently, and in nowhere near their current form. Yet, writing them was an integral precursor to writing a lengthier, better connected, more sophisticated work.
One of the pieces starts with a scene I tried so hard to incorporate beyond what I turned into my workshop instructor. It was a turning point. However, I relegated it to the “reject” file because it functions in exactly the same way as another scene that did end up in the manuscript.
The Haircut from Hell
In spring 2008, while planning my second wedding, I had an appointment with my fifth hairdresser in a year-and-a-half near Atlanta. My longtime stylist was in Orange County, California, and I couldn’t seem to find one in Georgia who didn’t screw up my hair while charging exorbitant rates. Highlights were either nonexistent within a few weeks, or my hair was bleached until it was canary yellow. There was no in-between. The stylist I visited while planning my wedding was my first repeat appointment since I’d moved there. She’d done a passable job on my hair the first time. The second time, however, she was having an off day, and that’s being kind.
“Are you growing your hair out for the wedding?” she asked.
“Yes. I just need a trim,” I said.
She stood between me and the mirror cutting layers, which she later called “blending.” Only, these weren’t “layers,” and I didn’t need them because my hair is extremely thin. When she was finished, and I saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked into silence. She had completely hacked off one side of my hair.
“This debacle cost me my resolve to make Georgia my home.”
I called my fiancé to pick me up and said, “I’m done.” I wasn’t only done with my appointment; I was done in a much more final way. I cried all the way home while he tried to reassure me it wasn’t “that bad.” Only, it was worse than I initially thought.
“When I got home and brushed it out, it was as uneven as if she’d cut it with pruning shears. I wasn’t a shrub in the backyard. I was a person supposed to be married in eight weeks.”
It took a year for my hair to grow out again. While this was a devastating, defining moment, it wasn’t necessary to include it in the book because I wrote about another crucial moment when I was considering whether or not to call off my wedding and move back to California. I didn’t need two. What came next in the disjointed 2008 piece, though, did make it into the book in an adjusted form.
Finding the Structure
One of the main differences between that early essay and what appears in my memoir now is the way in which the Georgia story is organized. In my earlier work, only months after the incident occurred, I was still trying to figure out what the story was. I wrote the salon scene and then a wedding planning scene that occurred before the inept stylist chopped off my hair. The order doesn’t make sense. I wrote them out of chronological order because I didn’t consciously choose what should come first; I wrote what came next in my brain as I was putting words on the page.
Portions of my current manuscript are nonchronological, but I made organizational decisions with forethought and a purpose after multiple drafts—with help from an astute editor who advised, in some cases, figuring out what elements don’t go together and deciding why they do.
In the manuscript, the wedding planning follows the proposal, and the revelatory alternative to the salon catastrophe follows the wedding planning—because that’s the order in which they transpired. There is no need to make it more complicated than it needs to be.
In the fifteen-year-old version, after an argument resulted in my fiancé telling me to “do what you want. It’s your wedding,” I include a paragraph about the first time I visited him “when we were merely clandestine pen pals,” which is a head-scratcher. I don’t incorporate any noticeable transition or reasonable page break between beats that would signify why they appear in that order.
I return to wedding planning after a flashback consisting of a list of cities and romantic encounters we had during our honeymoon phase when we were in a long-distance relationship, both of which make it into the manuscript, but, again, in a more logical sequence and with new surrounding material that delves deeper into what was really going on—the “what does this all mean?” part.
A Trip to the Mall with My Would-Be Stepdaughter
The second, related piece from my Memoir II workshop details a trip to the mall with my fiancé’s seven-year-old daughter, where I bought her hot chocolate, a giant pretzel, and a furry yellow stuffed duck because I felt guilty I was about to leave her, which she didn’t know yet.
I was reminded of how much I was not her mom, however, when she didn’t thank me for the treats, instead asking me to buy her Crocs too. I reminded her, “Your mom buys your shoes, sweetie.” Then she begged while I kept saying no.
After likening myself to a “hip aunt you only see on holidays,” I transition into a description of the moms who perpetually sit in the driveway across the street from my fiancé’s house while their children stumble around in the grass, toys strewn about: “a suburban housewife nightmare.”
I return to the mall scene before we inform the children I’m leaving: another odd organizational tactic. Dropping the news on my fiancé’s ten-year-old son crushes him “like a tin can.” Then we’re back in the mall, where I tell his sister we have to leave so we can make it to his Little League game. The scenes are all over the place.
Facing the Big Questions
Here’s what’s missing from that first attempt at writing the story, aside from a conscientious structure: What do I really want? Approaching thirty-five, is being a stepmom in Georgia enough? Do I want to be part of the “housewife nightmare” across the street (read: Am I jealous?), or is being only a “real” mom not enough either? If I leave this readymade family, is it worth it if I never have another family of my own again?
These are questions I grapple with in the manuscript, in addition to fleshing out and tightening the scenes from 2008—in a much more cogent arrangement. If I hadn’t jotted the details of my experiences as a pseudo-Southern stepmom in the same year in which they occurred, however, I would not have remembered the specifics when, in 2014, I sat down to “write a book.”
Write the material while still emotionally invested, and edit it when there’s temporal and sentimental distance—when the gut-level impact wanes.
One Last Online Writing Workshop Before I Quit
After three creative writing workshops—one through UCI Extension and two through Gotham Writers Workshop—I noodled with a few essays on my own, including one I worked on for seven years that I never quite figured out, nor tried to publish. Not having instructor-imposed deadlines proved to be a detriment to my writing in my late thirties, as I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to when no one was awaiting pages. A stifling fear of failure hindered my progress—hooray, anxiety!—which is why, in spring 2011, I signed up for another online memoir writing workshop, following my previous instructor to her new venture with her then husband. The feedback I received on two long essays I wrote during that class would send me into a tailspin that led to a two-year break from writing anything. That’s next time.